Source Engine 2

[TorQueMoD]

So how many of you think the reason for the insane wait between Episode 2 and 3 is because Valve is working on Source Engine 2?

The original HL2 was released on November 16, 2004. Episode 1 was released on June 1, 2006 which is roughly 18 months later. Episode 2 was released on October 10, 2007 approximately 16 months after Episode 1. Today's Date is December 7, 2009 a staggering 26 months since Episode 2!! (And unless they release the game this June, its going to be more than twice as long as the development time for Ep2!) That's more than 1/3 the time between Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 (72 months)!

Now some of you may say, well they've been working on a lot of different projects since Episode 2. They have Team Fortress 2, Portal and Left 4 Dead not to mention that they're still updating Counter-Strike.

Well, that's just it. TF2 and Portal were both released with Episode 2 and although they are updating the games, those updates aren't going to take up a significant amount of a professional game studio's time. Left 4 Dead was developed by Turtle Rock Studios up until the point where Valve bought the company a few months before the game was released. A bit of spit and shine by Valve and the game is released. Left 4 Dead 2? Released exactly 12 months after the original to the day (November 17th)! That means it took Valve 4 months less time to make L4D2 than it took them to make Episode 2 and we all know how short EP2 was. Not to mention the fact that before aquiring Turtle Rock, Valve had approximately 56 designers working for them. Today Valve has an incredible 87 employees working for them and you can sure as heck bet that they're not all working on Episode 3!

My theory? I think Valve is trying to make it look like they've been busy as hell pumping out games to distract us from the fact that its 26 months and counting since Episode 2 was released. I think not only are they working on Episode 3, taking their time to ensure its supreme quality; I think they are also working on a brand new up-to-snuff version of the Source engine AND they've also already started working on their next IP outside of the Half-Life Universe!

The last time I remember sitting around thinking to myself "WTF is Valve doing? Are they all lying around on a tropical island beach somewhere sipping margaritas and rolling in cash?" was about 3 months before they announced Half-Life 2 around this time of the year in 2002.

Mark my words, I'd bet my house, my car and my wife that Valve is going to absolutely blow us away with announcements at E3 2010!

What do you think?

(Disclaimer: I don't actually own a house or a car and I'm not married. This "Bet" is made between TorQue[MoD] and the entirety of the Interlopers.net community. No purchase necessary. To be eligible to win, a participant must issue a counter "bet" by casting their vote above and must be a resident of Djibouti on the North West Coast of Africa, with a shanty located on the South East Corner of Alaili Dadda in the Tadjourah Region 33 paces north of the petrified stool of a female Pangolin)

[Kremator]

Possible but we'll have to see, could be more like Source 1.5 than 2.0 - if they're making an entirely new engine I doubt we'll get much at the next E3, let alone 2011.

They're definitely expanding into non-HL titles so it is entirely reasonable to suspect that they're cooking something up alongside ep3. It's too early to tell really, I do hope they show something soon though, Source 2.0 or not.

[MayheM]

I have to agree. Though I think the best part about the Source engine is its ability to be run on a halfway decent box unlike some games that require you to upgrade just to play them. I had a beast of a rig and ran Crysis and it lagged. That is lame! Valve could very well be working on something that will rock our socks off, I would imagine it will utilize DX11 since almost everyone has moved to at least Vista. But like I stated about them making sure everyone can enjoy the game, I think they are making sure the optimize the engine so it can be run on the average persons machine. It has been a very long time between releases and have to think they are working on something big! I choose to believe that is the case...

[Armageddon]

Half-Life 3 will be a new engine but Ep3 will be source.

[TorQueMoD]

Half-Life 3 will be a new engine but Ep3 will be source.

Half-Life 2 Episode 1-3 IS Half-Life 3. How are so many people confused by this? They simply took the sequel and divided it into 3 parts so that we get the end result faster. (that was their theory anyway)
And Orange Box is already Source engine 1.5.

When I think about it more, in all likelyhood they probably are going to release Episode 3 this June since they seem to be going with an early summer or early winter release pattern for all their games and a 32 month development cycle just means it'll be longer than EP 1 and 2 but not quite as long as HL2.

I do still think they're bound to be working on a new version of the Source engine by now though even if it is only going to be used by a new IP. I'm not saying the engine will necessarily be released in 2010, but we'll definitely hear about it this year I think.

And yeah, Crysis just has really shitty optimization and programming though cause there's no reason it SHOULD slow everyone's system down so much. Look at Unreal Tourney 3 and Gears of War. They look as good if not better than Crysis and they run smooth as silk.

And Vista is the devil! I'm staying with XP till at least the second service pack for windows 7. I refuse to believe its as good as they say it is since they said the same about Vista and I'd rather run a Can of Tuna for my OS than Vista.

[Zipfinator]

Half-Life 2 Episode 1-3 IS Half-Life 3. How are so many people confused by this? They simply took the sequel and divided it into 3 parts so that we get the end result faster. (that was their theory anyway)
And Orange Box is already Source engine 1.5.

When I think about it more, in all likelyhood they probably are going to release Episode 3 this June since they seem to be going with an early summer or early winter release pattern for all their games and a 32 month development cycle just means it'll be longer than EP 1 and 2 but not quite as long as HL2.

I do still think they're bound to be working on a new version of the Source engine by now though even if it is only going to be used by a new IP. I'm not saying the engine will necessarily be released in 2010, but we'll definitely hear about it this year I think.

I've been under the impression from the interviews that EP1-3 was a continuation of the HL2 story arc so they could release something else before Source 2 and Half-Life 3. Half-Life 3 will be a completely new story arc from what I've read in interviews from a few years ago.

And I'm guessing that they'll release an Episode 3 version of the engine in a similar fashion to the Episode 2 engine, although it should have more improvements than the EP2 engine had compared to EP1 based off the time gap. They're also working on expanding Portal and the DOTA guy's game.

[poisonic]

ofcourse they are working on the old already revised source engine...... by adding new tricks of trade they just spice the orange engine a bit...... the reason why some games make not 100% usage of the engine is because they are still learning.... by example a bioshock would be possible even on the ep1 engine... you just have to reinvent some wheels...
and ad some new things to the source engine ...

and yes they are still bussy with hl3.... because that would be the last sequel...

btw its not an new engine if you add some extra spice .....

A new engine would mean they have to build it from the ground up.....so upgrading is the best to do...
source engine is based on hl1 engine if you like it or not......its a very good upgraded version look at the similarities of the entity's listing with ep2 they upgraded again with some new inprovements
if you look in map editing alone you will see what i mean..... and what about IP.... and they keep the new engine as a secret..... upon its release... with maybe hl4 lol...
to my opinion source is one of the best engines ATM.... why?? because i can even play hl2 on my 8 year old p4 2.4 ghz 1gb ram and a gf7600..... most games are a sort of demos to let you buy new hardware.... like some game companys get a bag of $$$$$$$$$$$ from a gpu or cpu manufactor to let their hardware be the best in that new game....
even 3dmark is guilty that way....

[Armageddon]

They have already confirmed that the Episodes are not Half-Life 3 and that they are already in the production of making a new engine for Hlaf-Life 3.

[TorQueMoD]

I don't have time to look up the quote right now, but Gabe said in an interview that in hindsight they should have called it Half-Life 3 Episode 1, 2 and 3 to avoid the confusion.

There isn't going to be a Half-Life 3. The story is finished after episode 3 at which point they've said they're working on new IP. They're not going to dump the HL Universe entirely, but they're not gonna make any more HL universe games for a long while.

[poisonic]

rumours go around dx11 itself.... like it would be also usable in LINUX i realy hope this is true it would be a great step forward to prove that M$ windows lags as hell in performance..... also xp has a 3gigabyte limitation .. wich is weird... because thats only the case on a XP os... so they released a vista version so you guys could use more memory wich is to my opinion retarted..... my mobo can handel a maxium of 16GB why o why is m$ XP so lame.... my mobo is older than vista 4 years ago.... so i realy dont get it any more... i think M$ is the cause of limited pc hardware usage... im also suspecting.... dx10 and windows are the cause of poor pc performance.... thats why i hope linux wil get dx11 as well this combination crushes the dx11 perfomance on a windows machine....

[Zipfinator]

I don't have time to look up the quote right now, but Gabe said in an interview that in hindsight they should have called it Half-Life 3 Episode 1, 2 and 3 to avoid the confusion.

There isn't going to be a Half-Life 3. The story is finished after episode 3 at which point they've said they're working on new IP. They're not going to dump the HL Universe entirely, but they're not gonna make any more HL universe games for a long while.

I remember you've brought this up before somewhere here and it was completely disproved. I'll try to find a thread but this has popped up a few times and I remember the final consensus was that it's not Half-Life 3 and even if they meant it to be as Half-Life 3 it's not the end of Gordon's tale.

[poisonic]

I don't have time to look up the quote right now, but Gabe said in an interview that in hindsight they should have called it Half-Life 3 Episode 1, 2 and 3 to avoid the confusion.

rumours my friend.....
HL3 is gonna be released any way.....

[whiffen]

rumours go around dx11 itself.... like it would be also usable in LINUX i realy hope this is true it would be a great step forward to prove that M$ windows lags as hell in performance..... also xp has a 3gigabyte limitation .. wich is weird... because thats only the case on a XP os... so they released a vista version so you guys could use more memory wich is to my opinion retarted..... my mobo can handel a maxium of 16GB why o why is m$ XP so lame.... my mobo is older than vista 4 years ago.... so i realy dont get it any more... i think M$ is the cause of limited pc hardware usage... im also suspecting.... dx10 and windows are the cause of poor pc performance.... thats why i hope linux wil get dx11 as well this combination crushes the dx11 perfomance on a windows machine....

Some misinformation here

Windows XP is only limited to ~3GB's in the x86 (32 bit) versions. The x64 bit version can use up to 128GB to potentially 2TB in other OS's, usually business ones.

32 Bit OS

2^32 = 4,294,967,296

4,294,967,296 / (1,024 x 1,024) = 4,096MB

That give you a maximum of 4GB total you can use. Lets say you have 4GB of memory installed, and your graphics card uses 1GB. Thats 5GB in total, but you are limited to 4, so you take about 1GB away from your memory, leaving you with the infamous 3GB of memory and 1 GB for your graphics card.

"Microsoft is the cause of limited PC hardware usage and slow performance?" Uh, not to say they are perfect but everything works fine for me, and while Linux is better at booting up faster and using less memory, windows is generally better at benchmarks and file transferring.

[poisonic]

thanks for clearing up some things but i did not count my gfx memory but i still think that a linux system could outrun a windows machine.... i did some tests in the past.. using renoise on windows and linux... linux was the winner in my test overal the cpu usage of the os linux was much lower and had faster load and save times.... of course we cant do tests on how a game would perform on a linux system exept for half life2 to wich has to work on linux... if some one is willing to test if hl2 runs better on a linux machine.... i suspect that linux wil give a much higher frame rate but thats only guesing for now.... the system load is much smaller on linux machine...... compaired to windows.... just press ctrl+alt+del and then task manager to see what i mean.... all kinds of rubish are running freely on a windows machine.... SPYware and Viruses are windows related... i never heard of viruses and spyware for linux only when people emulated windows with wine this ocured in the emulated windows only lol....
would that be one of the benefits of a root password wich windows does not own.... the rootpassword keeps unwanted things out of linux by disableling the read and write actions of unknown programs...

[stoopdapoop]

It would be madness if they were to drop source, there's no way in hell they would. There are probably going to be some new in house features they'll be working on, but source isn't really an aggressively licensed engine, so I don't know how many of those tools we'll see. (Right now we don't get any of their in house tools).

Even if they call it a new engine, it'll probably just be source with a new name and a lot of new features.